Circle Warns About Scammers Baiting USDC Users

Circle, the firm behind USDC stablecoin, issued a warning about an active phishing campaign attempting to lure users into transferring tokens to malicious addresses.

As per the tweet, the threat actors masquerading to work for Centre, which is a consortium founded by Coinbase and Circle.

Circle’s Statement

Circle said there is no new version of the USDC token in the marketplace and urged users not to fall for the scam.

“PSA WARNING: There is an active phishing campaign attempting to lure users into transferring #USDC tokens to malicious addresses. The scammers are pretending to be from Centre. There is not a new version of USDC in the marketplace. Please do not fall for this.”

Circle CEO and founder Jeremy Allaire recently wrote to Congressional leaders for financial services, urging for clear, workable legislation on stablecoins in the United States while warning that failing to do so will attract more risks to the country.

Persistent Phishing Scams

Phishing activity, on the other hand, played a starring role during the bear market. The latest development emerges just days after the detection of a phishing campaign to bypass multi-factor authentication and gain access to accounts on crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, MetaMask, Crypto.com, and KuCoin and siphon crypto-assets.

According to BleepingComputer, the scammer’s entities abused the Microsoft Azure Web Apps service to host a network of phishing sites and lure victims to them via phishing messages impersonating fraudulent transaction confirmation requests or suspicious activity detection.”

More recently, a poorly made “deep fake” video of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, made rounds on Twitter, attempting to scam users affected by the exchange’s bankruptcy.

Furthermore, blockchain security expert CertiK revealed in a new report about a large group of professional “Know Your Customer (KYC)” actors being employed by dubious blockchain devs and scammers to defraud crypto investors.

The actors in question complete the KYC process on behalf of scam project owners to want to gain the crypto community’s trust before executing a rug pull.